Reply To: Blender vs. Zbrush

[coyo]

As someone who has used both tools my experience is that ZBrush is incredibly powerful. It can gracefully handle millions of polys, even on my old computer, without a stutter. The downside, and what eventually made me tap out of the ZBrush workflow (aside from cost), is the UI/UX. It’s absolutely awful (specifically navigation and saving) and the impression I get from Maxon is that, at the moment, they couldn’t fix it if they wanted to and there is currently no incentive to do the code forensics required anyway.

Obviously though, plenty of people have adapted to ZBrush.

If you watch Kent’s Human course you will, at times, see him struggling with and jumping through hoops to get Blender to produce the result he wants. Some of the issues he faces in that course have been resolved and Blender does perform better now…however, it simply can’t match whatever black magic code is powering ZBrush. The trade-off with Blender is that it gives you so many other excellent tools that are just a Tab key away (to put it simply).

Ultimately it comes down to the preferences of each individual sculptor. As Omar has said, the software itself isn’t going to make anyone into a good sculptor. The software is just a tool. If you are just starting out learning sculpting in general my advice would be to stick with Blender at first mainly because it’s free and thus an excellent way to get your feet wet. As someone with a real media sculpting background I can’t help but recommend getting ones hands on some clay as well – it can be a very good way to help understand forms better (and squishing clay is fun).

If you find you are getting really into digital sculpting look at the sort of thing you are wanting to create. If you find you are leaning toward creating sculpts with lots of fine detail then you might want to give some thought into moving to ZBrush. Blender, and your computer, will undoubtedly start letting you know when the limits are reached. 😀